


There are Heroes in the Seaweed

by smokefall



Category: Den lille Havfrue | The Little Mermaid - Hans Christian Andersen, Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - The Little Mermaid, Blood, Body Horror, Canon Era, F/F, London, Mermaid Éponine, Purple Prose, Slow Build, Tentacles, Transformation, Victor Hugo Pastiche
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-08
Updated: 2014-01-13
Packaged: 2018-01-04 01:04:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1075232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smokefall/pseuds/smokefall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Cosette and Valjean do flee to England after all, only to be hit by a terrible storm on the crossing. And in which Eponine is a young mermaid employed by her parents to lure sailors to the deep - until one stormy night when she impulsively saves a strange girl from drowning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Billows and Shadows

**Author's Note:**

  * For [voksen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voksen/gifts).



> From the kink meme prompt: _Lady Cosette and her father are fleeing the country due to sad persecution. On the boat crossing, there's a terrible storm and Cosette is flung overboard. She's saved just before she drowns by Eponine the mermaid, who brings her to shore where Valjean eventually finds her again._
> 
> _But now she can't quite think of the boy she left behind without remembering the mermaid's voice. Will she see either of them again?_
> 
> Which is just an excuse for me to pastiche two of my favourite authors, really. With a million thanks to voksen and everyone else who left lovely encouraging comments on the kink meme version.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _the Wracks - Eponine's errand - a storm - a rescue_

To the French it is La Manche; the English, naturally, call it the English Channel. But what name to they give it, those who dwell deep below its surface? They have a harsh, gloomy word for it in their tongue, which may be translated as the Wracks. There, the seabed is strewn with sunken ships, jumbled together by an ocean indifferent to their builders, their voyages, their wars; sprawling in every direction, some fallen on others, altogether making something like a city left to ruin, grown over with coarse seaweed, where toothsome fish gnaw on sailor’s bones and lawless mermen lay their plans.

Plans for what? For revolt? No; the word does not exist in their language. The ocean has borne witness to its share of great dramas, but revolution has not been among them. We might borrow metaphors from the sea when we talk of the revolutions of men, of tides and swells, currents and storms, but the sea herself would admit no resemblance between them. Underneath the wild tumult that she wears like a skin, ancient order prevails. The children of the sea live long, and live in plenty, if not freedom. To be beholden to the Sea-King and his vagaries is no great price to pay, when it means dwelling in his coral city, where the roofs are tiled with living oysters and the boulevards glow with trees bearing starry golden fruit.

For any who feel otherwise, the ocean is wide. It is easy to drift away until some other habitation catches hold of you. More often than not — whether due to the obscure whims of abyssal currents, or some strange magnetism of the place itself — that habitation is the Wracks, where the souls of the drowned snag in splintered hulls and the mermaids dance with wild lights flashing in their sea-black eyes.

It was from here, in the ruptured wreck of a once-proud warship, that a woman we should rather call mermadam than mermaid once stared up into the dark ocean heights. She cut a monstrous figure in the gloom, vast and barnacled, with her hair knotted into billowing nets and her tail bristling with spines. She possessed the swollen, deadly beauty of the deep.

‘There’ll be a storm this night,’ she said, in a voice full of teeth. ‘I feel it in my fins.’

This got the attention of her husband, a thin merman who, hard and bony, with staring eyes, long clawed hands and a skulking air, could easily be thought to have something of the crab in his genealogy. His wide, smiling mouth, meanwhile, suggested something of the shark.

‘That’s good!’ he came to the prow, and peered into the blackness below, called out: ‘Eponine!’ No reply came. ‘S’bones, I’ll scale the brat!’ he said. ‘Where’s she got to now?’

‘Out hunting treasure, no doubt.’

‘Eh! Why’d you have to go and teach her to read those books? Head full of pirates and pistols, what’s that good for?’

She gave him no reply, only carried on staring up as if she could see the massing clouds above the far surface. The merman cursed and dove over the ship’s edge, into the maze of narrow alleys defined by the hulls of great ships, some of which sat on the pale sand close as courting lovers though they had sunk centuries apart.

From the carcass of a ship almost thoroughly fallen in on itself, he saw the flash of a tail, and swam up close. There, in the shapeless shadows cast by the dim phosphorescence, was a young mermaid even thinner than he, almost a shadow herself, turning solitary circles around the white marble statue of a human girl and humming some tune she had doubtless learned from a dead sailor.

‘Eponine, get out of there,’ the merman said, grasping her by the bony arm. ‘You’ve work to do tonight.’ The mermaid turned pearly eyes on him and gave a dark grimace.

‘Have I now?’ she said.

 

What was she, the eldest child of this fearsome pair? A ragged sea-flower to outward appearances, a maelstrom within. She had the capricious heart common to all sea-daughters, and the treacherous beauty of the stillness that heralds a storm. When she raised her head above the waves, any who caught sight of her would see hair of shining bronze, floating in soft clouds around her; eyes that gently glowed, as round and faraway as two full moons. But below the surface, out of sight, she was sinew and bone, sharp claws and tattered fins. She swam with the starting, hungry movements of those indistinct predators of the deep that lie in beds of seaweed and strike without warning, a creature of shadow and swiftness propelled on two long, muscular tails.

Yet she was enamoured, as all mermaids are, of laughter and song and play, and the Wracks provided a playground exquisitely suited to her whimsies, furnished with ships to plunder and ghosts to taunt, ghosts who would rave about their homelands and their loves and the sweetness of the sun. What a strange world it sounded, endless and bright; she dreamed of it often, of waterless cities and burning light.

She had slipped away to see for herself on countless occasions, swimming as close as she dared to the towns that sat on the lip of the land, with their rows of shining houses all yellow and white. To see the people going about with their heavy, halting gait, free from the clutching of the ocean but tethered to the ground by their feet! She had seen feet on dead — on dying — men; how small, how impractical they were. Little wonder the men drowned so easily.

We have learned how she occupied her time, this sea-child; how, then, did her mother and father employ her? As a weapon, and a lure.

A soul swallowed by the sea is a sad thing, sickly and salted; dwindling to coral and weeds and, in time, to nothing at all. One that willingly descends, wrapped in the ecstasy of a mermaid’s embrace, is another matter: all that a soul contains — the fire of the mind and the forest of the heart, the strange constellations we call dreams and the deep wells we call fears — all this is preserved, half-living, half-knowing, all lost.

To save men from the former fate, and draw them down to meet the latter: such was the nature of Eponine’s work.

And so we see her now as she was on that night, gliding and leaping through waters that bucked and boiled, her moon-wide eyes keenly seeking for any poor ship in distress. From the towering crest of a wave she saw it, lit by a bolt of lightning that tore from the roiling clouds: a distant vessel, tossing on the furious sea. It was no effort at all for her to race the waves, diving into their bulging backs and rising again on their heights, until she could see the ship up close. A brave little thing, that ship seemed to her - so much smaller than many the sea had defeated before, yet still it set its groaning timbers against the hungry waves, the men on board crying out to one another. She could not hear their words, only their fear.

Had any spared a moment to glance down a the water, they would have seen a pair of shining eyes, circling closer. But none did; they were lost in their desperation, as if their voices were any match for the wind and waves. And, indeed, for a moment it seemed as though the frenzy of those shouting shadows had breathed a frantic kind of life into the ship herself. She dashed over the angry sea with stubborn animal spirit, escaping as if by sheer force of will the multitude of foaming mouths formed by the wind-lashed billows.

But she was one small vessel against the immense havoc of the sea. She pitched wildly as the waves kept up their assualt, and Eponine saw the form of a sailor flung from the rigging into the hungry black waves. He was immediately swept from the sight of those above, but Eponine would have no trouble finding him below. She prepared to dive — but as she did, a burst of lightning flooded the desperate scene, and in that moment all thought of the drowning sailor was struck from her mind.

There was a girl on deck, gripping the side, dark hair streaming about her face. In the instant of illumination, every detail of her was delineated in harsh white and plack, and in the soaked dress that clung to her skn she looked just like Eponine’s marble statue — except for her eyes, which fixed on Eponine’s with a queer intensity. She stood as if indifferent to the tearing wind and the clashing waves, as if the sea had caught her in some trance.

Eponine wanted, as she had never wanted anything in the great wide ocean before, to take that girl by the hand and lead her down, down to the dark passages of the Wracks, to have her as a playmate, to wreathe her in seaweed and dance with her among the old ship’s bones. It would be like having her sweet pretty statue come to life, to have it smile and join her conversations, to show it the secret places she knew and see its blank white eyes turn wide and lively at all the things Eponine had to tell and show it.

The sea, as if in tune with her thoughts, slammed again into the ship, breaking over the deck, and with a sudden cry — the first sign of fear she had shown — the girl was lifted off her feet and thrown to the waiting chaos.

Eponine plunged after her through the roaring gloom, saw her struggle against the inexorable swells, her dress billowing up about her and tangling in her limbs. Her reverie broken by the cold dark sea, the girl lashed back against the water, but she was losing the fight quickly. Eponine chased her down into the black, but by the time she clasped strong arms around the sinking form the girl’s flesh was already pale and cool, her eyes starting to flutter closed. A moment more and she’d be lost; now was the time to enchant her, invite her to the deathless world deep beneath the waves, to kiss the life out of her as they sank together.

The girl struggled once more, weakly, and Eponine found herself kicking against the tow, breaking the surface and holding her head above the water.

She could not say what had made her heart rebel — an unthought-of, reckless rebellion, when the endless sea itself had seemed so bent on taking this one down. She laughed suddenly at the thought. What could the waves do against her? The storm raged, tossing them where it would, but she kept them afloat, singing a jaunty tune she’d learned off a sailor.

They passed the night thus, Eponine putting all her resolve into this rash task that instinct had dictated to her, keeping her unconscious castaway from slipping under. She sang to pass the hours, and to drive from her ears the jealous roaring of the waves, which diminished with time to sullen mutterings.

Having nothing else to do, in this time, but to kick her tails in measured rhythm, with nothing to look at save for the girl and the endless waves — the ship, if it survived, was long gone from sight — Eponine’s thoughts began to turn contemplative. A mind that was so often busy chasing diversions, a being that seemed oftentimes to be composed of songs, chatter, wiles, whims and adventures, all light and fleeting things — none of this is to signify a being without vast depths. The teeming life at the reef’s edge might draw the eye away from the bottomless fathoms below, but whoso ignores the fathoms does so at their peril. Eponine, carried on that grim and featureless expanse of billows, rising and falling and rising and falling, felt her thoughts trembling on the brink of that steep gradient of the mind.

She would fall, periodically, into profound silences, and then burst into song again, mixing words and tunes from the chanteys she had sung earlier in the night. Sometimes she spoke to the cold, pale body in her arms, for all the girl heard nothing.

‘You mustn’t think me good,’ she warned. ‘I am wicked, but it’s all the same to me. No, it amused me to save you, that’s all it is. I’ve read tales — I can read, you know, and I speak French too, as you’d see if you were awake — most books go to pulp, but some are tough enough to hold their stories at the ocean’s bottom, and I’ve read tales where mermaids are kind. Ha! But I’m up for trying anything once, so why not, I thought, why not! Ah, I wonder which we’ll see first, land or daybreak?’

Then she would drop back into silence, and look from the blank sky to the ceaseless waves to the girl’s face, and in her mind’s eye perceive once more that sharp precipice beyond which swam great shoals of murky ideas.

‘There! It’s growing lighter, look!’ she said, and glancing down again, ‘and you’ve colour in your cheeks, too, which I’m led to believe is a sign of health among your lot.’

The ocean was almost calm again, and with the clearing sky and the first glimmers of dawn, it was possible to see the horizon — and there, distant but indisputable, was the low shadow of land. ‘Shall we race to shore?’ she asked; ‘No, it would hardly be a fair contest, would it? Come on, then.’

She closed the distance slowly, by her reckoning — although you or I would think it swift — and saw the land ahead resolve itself into pale cliffs. ‘That’s good,’ she told the girl, pausing to watch the cliff-faces turn from grey to gold in the sunrise. ‘I think your ship was bound this way. I know the port where they come in, isn’t that a bit of luck? Good thing I caught you, eh? Oh, there, you’re smiling. You look —'

But she did not know what she had meant to say.

There was not much distance left to swim, now, and Eponine soon had the port in sight, although she stayed wide of it to avoid the ships that came and went. She came to shore as close to the harbour wall as she dared, carrying her strange burden gently to the water’s edge, where the surf rolled sunlit and sibilant into the stony beach, placing her on a flat stretch of shingle among the rocks and the seaweed. Laid out there, in the morning blaze, the girl now looked nothing like a marble statue. She was pure radiance, a beacon; surely she would be easily found.

Eponine slid backwards in the water to a safe distance and kept silent watch, until one, then two, then a whole clamour of voices were raised; the shapes of men appeared on the beach. The girl was lifted and carried, amid cries of wonder and confusion from those who bore her, towards the long zig-zag track cut into the high white cliff-face.

But even when she was gone, the golden image of that shining figure lingered in Eponine’s vision, even as she turned, even as she dove back down into the deeps.


	2. The Lowest Depths

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _what Eponine did next - what lies beneath the Wracks - a meeting with the sea-witch - a journey_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PSA I've updated the rating and tags to reflect this chapter :)

As Eponine turned tail on that new-lit world of air and men, her mind was roiling with the memories of the night she had passed. She could barely see; she was like a chasm-dwelling anglerfish that had never seen any light but its own lure faced suddenly with the brightness of the sun. She found her way home by instinct, not sight.

What had sent her thoughts to that strange brink, she could not have said. But even after she had put the depth of the sea between herself and the events of that night, Eponine could not keep herself from sinking into pensive moods, in which the same images repeated themselves over and over in her mind: the girl lit by the lightning flash, the girl tangling in her dress as she sank, the girl lying on the shore with her colour at last returning, as if the sun itself were pouring light into her.

At times, the fancy struck her that she had seen that face before, but then she would shake the idea from her mind; the girl was too much like a blooming flower of the land to resemble anyone who dwelt below the waves. And yet wherever she went, however much she tried to amuse herself with her old pastimes, the memory of holding such fragile, warm life in her arms would well up, and she would turn her face towards the far-off surface.

All who saw her saw how strangely thoughtful she had grown. Her father, who had expected a good catch that night, demanded to know why she had been so long gone with nothing to show for it. Her sister and young brothers, who knew they could rely on Eponine for a good story, often asked her what she had seen. She always told them the same:

‘There was nothing to see, only a sulking coward of a storm that refused to strike any ship down.’

But they wouldn’t relent. Her younger sister would follow her about, hoping that Eponine might once again play and sing with her as before, repeating her refrain of ‘tell me, tell me!’

‘Nothing to tell, Zelma.’ They were in Eponine’s favourite wreck, where the marble girl was, where Eponine had come so often since returning to the Wracks — to sit with her arms and tails twined around the statue in the gloomy shade. ‘Ah, but how fine it would be to have such radiance here!’ She said this to herself, but her sister’s eyes lit up at it.

‘Then there’s something! Tell me, you must!’

Long pointed limbs, a narrow face, and a wide, cloudy gaze — such was Zelma, a child tugged thin between two poles of compulsion: obedience to her parents, and emulation of Eponine. She adored her sister, but not without jealousy, and there was no worse thing she could imagine at that moment than Eponine having had an adventure and not telling her about it. But with time she noticed that when she pleaded, Eponine said nothing; when she was quiet, and Eponine was drawn into her own thoughts and muttering to herself, well, _then_ she might learn something.

‘She had no business being so bright,’ she said. ‘Or to seem so familiar, when I can’t ever have seen her before. Wouldn’t it be nice to have her here, though! What was I thinking, carrying her to shore like that!’ she paused, and sighed, and looked up into the water. ‘I wonder where she is now?’

And Zelma, with the spite of spurned siblings everywhere, carried this to the merman and mermadam. The mermadam’s eyes glittered. She had Zelma repeat the whole thing a second time, and looked meaningfully at the merman.

‘You don’t think—’ he began.

‘Remarkable how things come around, eh?’ she replied, lifting her daughter with broad barnacled hands so they were eye to eye. ‘Zelma, my pearl, you want your sister to be happy, don’t you?’ The young mermaid nodded. ‘Ah, you’re a good girl. And all we want is what’s best for our girls, isn’t that so?’

‘Exactly so,’ said the merman.

’Now you get back to your sister, and don’t let her do a thing without you marking it and telling us about it, right?’

Zelma nodded, mutely, and hurried back to the wreck where the statue stood.

But, as with so often when Eponine was wanted, she was nowhere to be found.

 

We have said that the Wracks is something of a city, and like any city it has its underground. That is the sorrow of cities — those monsters that, although built of stones and bricks and wood, acquire terrible souls of their own: even in the most wretched of them, there are yet more wretched layers hidden below. And even here, in what is already perhaps a parody, perhaps a misshapen shadow of a city, there are tunnels filled with darker and stranger things still.

Beneath the disarray of sea-split ships, there are places where the seabed is cracked and crevassed, ragged mouths of rock that open wide to swallow down whatsoever falls their way. They run deep, and are home to strange vegetations, grasping polypi, eyeless creeping things. At the epoch which we are describing, the greatest of these chasms, which ran down the very heart of the Wracks, was ruled by a band of creatures feared even by the most degenerate of mermen: the sea-witches. Rarely seen, they were nonetheless known throughout the Wracks; they were a tale to frighten children, but also a channel by which just about anything might be acquired, for they were steeped in the black magic of the ocean’s depths.

The obscure beings that governed this lower floor of the Wracks were known more for their deeds than their appearances — all save for one, whose danger lay half in his knowledge, and half in his beauty. His name was Parnasse.

A baleful, beguiling figure was Parnasse: a child of the abyss, with lucent skin, lips like coral, flowing black hair and the pearly light of deep-sea lures in his eyes. He had studied all the ocean’s horrors, and knew all its mysteries.

He was a creature of shadow and light: a shining torso with narrow waist blooming into thick black tentacles with which he glided and grasped his way through the Wracks, both above and below. It was said that he had left numerous corpses and corrupted hearts in his wake, and that he discriminated not between human and merman.

It was to him that Eponine had gone.

She swam, with her long hair bound tightly around her head, through black waters into the deeper darkness below, sheering away from the bodies of the reaching polypi which caught anything that came their way. She saw the carcasses of great fish, bleached skeletons of sailors, and a young mermaid, half-eaten and ghastly, but she kept on her swerving course until she came to the colourless sand at the very bottom. There, between the groping limbs of this insatiate forest, were houses built from the bones of the wrecked; Eponine swam straight to the grandest of these, and through the yawning jawbone of an ancient shark that served as its gate.

She had hardly done so when she felt herself caught by the tail, and she twisted around to face the figure who had crept up on her from behind.

‘I knew you’d be coming, little Ponine.’ Parnasse had his pretty lips parted in a smile full of pointed teeth, and two of his tentacles wrapped around her waist. ‘And what you’re after. Let me warn you, it’s no simple thing to ask.’

‘I haven’t even asked it yet.’

‘But you will,’ he said, winding a third tentacle up one tail. ‘You always ask, and you always get.’ He coiled a fourth pulsing limb lightly around her neck.

‘I saved a girl from drowning. I want to find her.’

‘And you think I’ll help you.’ He pulled her closer, reached up another tentacle to touch her cheek. Eponine turned her head and caught it in her teeth.

‘Yes,’ she said around the slick black flesh, pausing to tongue it gently before spitting it unceremoniously out: ‘less you’re jealous?’

Parnasse gave a laugh. ‘And why would I be jealous? There’ll always be mermaids wanting favours off me. No, I’m warning you, plain and simple: it’ll cost.’

‘Oh, well,’ Eponine said, and pressed forward, winding her tails together to hold captive the tentacle that had been meant to hold her. ‘Why didn’t you say sooner?’

‘Not that, Ponine,’ he said, and his lantern-eyes flared with pale warning. ‘It’ll cost me too. There’s no fun in this, for either one of us.’

She regarded him: his hair like floating ink, his tight pressed lips. ‘You’re a strange serious sort of Parnasse today. Are you helping me or not?’

‘…And you always get,’ he said.

They released each other in the same moment, and Parnasse flowed over the pallid sand to the entrance of his bone house, Eponine following close behind. Inside, the gleaming walls were adorned with charms and shipwreck trophies, the ceiling cluttered with hanging things: pots and pans, bunches of deadly sea-herbs, nets of writhing boneless creatures with staring eyes, and live snakes plaited into twitching ropes.

In the centre of the floor, a ring of grinning jawbones formed the sides of a well, with a chute of boiling water rising from within, throwing out baleful light and twisting heat to fill the space. Parnasse pulled down a bouquet of black sea-flowers and held them in the boiling steam; they wilted, bled colour and scent, staining the water purple and sickly-sweet. Eponine felt Parnasse wind his tentacles around her once more, pulling her close to the chute and pressing something into her hands — a ship’s porthole window. ‘Think of her,’ he said.

All was heat and glaring shadow, her gills stinging with heady perfume, and the glass before her eyes bubbling with visions that rose in rapid succession and swallowed one another: buildings breathing long plumes of smoke, a river flowing black under a bridge with many arches, heaving crowds of people — and breaking through it all, like a beacon, that radiant face, the girl accompanied by an old man — and then the swirl of crowds again, and smoke, and nothing.

Parnasse took the window back as she swayed, her gills and mind clearing as the water boiled away the last of the choking sweetness. ‘Ah, Ponine,’ he said. ‘She’s a pretty thing.’

‘Can you do it? Bring her back here?’

‘She’s beyond my reach,’ Parnasse said, eyes fixed on Eponine while his lower limbs went crawling over the walls, gathering items that hung there. ‘You’d have to go and find her yourself. And not as you are.’

She felt, again, as she had that night, when her body had acted of its own accord, a deep swell of nameless purpose confounding both her intent and understanding. It surged in her chest, and moved her tongue: ‘Do it.’

‘Do you understand what it is you’re asking?’

She laughed. ‘I’m still here, aren’t I?’

Parnasse placed a cauldron on the jawbone well, and coiled two tentacle-tips around her tails. ‘You’ll lose these. You’ll walk, you’ll breathe air, you’ll be dizzy and stumbling and every step will feel like walking on knives. I cannot reverse the magic. Merfolk live for hundreds of years, then return to the sea to be born again; humans threescore and ten if they are fortunate, and no one knows what becomes of _them_ once they’ve lived out their sad short span.’ He smiled a grim smile, teeth shining. ‘You’ll face that fate, you’ll give up the sea and never return, unless you bring that girl back down with you.’

‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘I’ll fetch her here, and we’ll be together under the waves?’

‘Yes. But there’s the matter of your payment.’ He touched pale fingers to her throat, slow, pensive. ‘Something precious, something yours.’

‘Pah, what’ve I got that’s precious?’

‘Your voice.’

She gave a wordless cry, as if her throat itself violently protested the thought.

‘Have I frightened you at last, little Ponine?’

‘Not a bit!’ she said. 'Surprised me, perhaps. But what’s my voice to me? Giddy old thing, always running away with itself, I hardly know what it’s doing half the time. Don’t see what good it’ll do you — but if that’s your price, then have it and be done.’

‘Patience,’ said Parnasse, pulling down a knot of snakes from the ceiling and scouring the insides of the cauldron. The light that glimmered from the well had died to a dim blue, and his pearly eyes gleamed in the thickened shadows as he poured indistinct substances into the pot, stirred it three times with a long thin bone.

Then Eponine found her wrists grasped once more, felt the soft pull of suckers on her skin. Parnasse drew her close. ‘My own blood must go into this,’ he said, pressing a knife into her hand, and guiding her so the tip touched his breast. ‘If you want to know why the price is what it is. I don’t bleed for nothing.’

Then he uncoiled his tentacles from her arms, leaving her with the knife, free to move — to make the choice; she felt her thoughts peering over the edge of that chasm once more, at the stirring gloom below. And how — she heard herself wondering, as if from far away — how would she keep that gloom at bay, if she could not talk or laugh or sing? Yet even as she thought it, she twisted the knife, carved a dark crescent, a smile, into Parnasse’s pale skin. She heard his hiss of pain, then green-black blood was blooming into the water; she tasted a trace of it in her gills, sharp and spiced, but only faintly: it flowed of its own accord, ribboning its way slowly into the cauldron, which seethed and spat, pouring out cloudy shadows in ghastly shapes to billow about the room. When the clouds cleared, the cauldron was calm, filled with a clear draught that glittered like starlight on a soft tide.

Parnasse filled a vial and stoppered it. ‘Here’s yours,’ he said. ‘Now I’ll take mine.’ And he kissed her, teeth sharp on her lips; she thought he might bite out her tongue, but then felt his own tongue slide over hers, extend past it and into her throat, rough and rasping, and then a sudden piercing pain. Her muffled cry was cut short as Parnasse withdrew, swallowed, and pulled away from her with bloodied mouth.

She did not have to try speaking to know no sound would emerge; the absence was raw and jagged within her. She watched the threads of blood that floated from her lips and laughed silently to show Parnasse that she was yet unfazed.

‘Fearless Ponine. You’ll get yourself in real trouble one of these days.’ Did she imagine it, or was his dark, fluid voice mixed with a new tone, a rough mirth she knew too well? ‘Go now. The draught won’t keep. You’ll find the city west of here, up the great river-mouth. When you come to shore, drink it down in one go — and do it before the sun rises. You’ll feel unspeakable pain. Your gills will close, your fins wither, and your tails will shed their scales and turn to legs. Then you’re on your own.’

Eponine hung motionless in the water. She could no more curse him than thank him, now; could only stare at him for a long moment, before turning and darting from the bone house.

 

Back through the forest of grasping polypi she swam, up out of the sea-witches’ valley and into the Wracks again. She skirted the edges of the ships, avoiding signs of life, not wishing to meet anyone. If her father should find her and try to hold her back, or worse, if Zelma should try to speak and play with her — no, she would not think of Zelma.

Though she kept to the darkest and emptiest passages, the vial in her hand glimmered like a star, drawing half-blind fish and long-fingered ghosts to trail in her wake; they fell behind when she swam free of the Wracks, and then she had only the wide dark sea and the pale light of the magic draught for company. When she breached the surface it was black and starless above, dawn still far off, but she increased her speed all the same, diving in and out of the water until the rhythm of her splashes was almost a substitute for song.

She found the river-mouth by taste, the trace of once-fresh water soured by its progress through human lands. The estuary was busy with great ships and twinkling fishing boats, and she kept close to the bottom, swimming among the sickly seaweed, the bottles and the rustling boat-parts that jutted from the black mud. The river became narrower every time she surfaced, marshlands and sleeping towns replaced by smoking buildings such as she had seen in the porthole vision, and docks that heaved with men and lights, and both the air and the water became equally foul: choking filth below the surface, reeking fog above.

But the sound the city made, the roaring and chuckling of a beast with a thousand throats, was a welcome music after the silence of the sea, and the world was lit on either side by yellow lights that glimmered through the smog and played mistily on the black water. Eponine kept her head up, kicking her way between the boats and under the bridges, until one loomed above her that she recognised from her vision.

She sat, for a moment, after pulling herself ashore: the mud cold and stony on her scales, the belly of the bridge shuddering with movement from above, the great groaning din on every side. So this was what men called a city! Like the Wracks and nothing like the Wracks, and the more she listened to it the more it seemed to murmur _come, come_.

She unstoppered the vial and drank the glittering draught down in one gulp.

For a moment, nothing. And then her vision burst white and black as pain blazed through her skull, her spine, her tails. It felt like her bones had been shot through with fire and were splitting open, cracking and reforming within her; she threw back her head to scream and could make no sound; she writhed in the mud, desperate to plunge back into the cold river, but her body was fixed to the spot.

She couldn’t breathe; her chest was tight, bursting, her gills were clamping shut. She felt at her throat in confusion and found the skin of her neck sealing closed, her fingers shrinking, clawless, useless, as she scratched at herself in a vain effort to open her gills again.

There was no release, no relief from the pain, the stabbing of her own fin-spines as they were swallowed up by her body, the scalding agony that swept over her tails. She could only clutch at herself and howl soundlessly as her scales blistered and peeled, too-tender flesh swelling up from underneath, lacerating itself on the scales that had not yet split away. And it was _hers_ , that colourless, unshining hide that slashed itself over and over in the fight against her true skin — and was winning, and had won.

 

It was the dim returning awareness of the city — louder now, and glinting with dull dawn — that told her it was over. She was breathing; through her mouth now, air cold in her open, gasping throat. All that remained of her tails were tatters of fish-skin in the mud, as she raised herself slowly, shakily, gulping down every grimy breath as if it were the sweetest water, to stand on her naked bloodied legs, and take her first trembling step.


	3. Interlude: 1805

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _the wreckage of a battle - an encounter_

_Few scenes are more frightful than a battle at sea, save for the calm that follows. After the hollering of cannon-fire and the cracking of hulls, the spill of blood and the burning decks, what remains? The floating charnel and the great wide ocean, glutted on brave men’s bodies._

_Although the sea is indifferent to the wars of men, it may amuse itself with their battles, should they encroach on its domain. It might pick a side, it might not; in the end, it is on no side but its own and the one true victor._

_Here, now, the sea is in a hungry mood, and follows the calm with a gale. The battlefield itself rises against the armies, the limitless gloom reaching up for more. Tatters of spray resembling souls wrenched from their mortal casings are torn from the waves; topmasts and spars broken but not yet fallen, caught in the chaos of ripped sail and rigging, reach down as if in response._

_Long after the last cannon-shot has been fired, the sea states and restates its sovereignty._

_The men who fall are swallowed twice — once by the waves, again by the flat-eyed creatures who gather for their flesh. And not only their flesh: the sea-bed below a battle always receives naked corpses, their raiments and effects stripped from them by covetous mermen well before they sink beyond the reach of daylight._

_But not all sink: some, crushed among the floating wreckage, still turn their faces to the sky. Men who were just a moment ago alive, now pinioned between the sea and air by the smashed bodies of their gallant ships._

_Among this wave-tossed ruin, a swimming shape can be seen: a pale thin shadow cutting a rapid route back and forth between the clashing debris, striking and shrinking like some loathly sea-worm, equal parts boldness and cowardice. It passes the dead in an uncertain dance, until it sees one who is not so badly mangled as most. A man in a fine officer’s jacket, bright medals on his breast, and on his outflung hand a ring of gold._

_The creature pulls the man from the wreckage, divests him of ring and jacket, and drops them into the storming depths, where an indistinct shape waits to receive them. This theft completed, the creature moves to continue his hideous review of the dead, when the man groans and catches hold of his arm._

_‘Alive, are you?’ mutters the merman; ‘all the better!’ And he sets about prising the man from the mess of floating wreckage._

_The man’s eyes fly open, gaze on the merman as if unsure he is not in some delirium. ‘You have saved my life,’ he says, astonished._

_The merman allows himself a wicked grin at that, and redoubles his efforts, but is brought short by the sound of a dispatch ship drawing near._

_‘I’m not one to leave a man dying,’ he tells the officer. ‘But I can’t stay here. I’ll be shot and hauled up for a prize. You can get yourself the rest of the way out.’_

_The man is working himself free with renewed vigour, now. ‘I shall not forget you,’ he says. ‘If I come out of this, I’ll be in your debt.’_

_The merman has already turned, ready to dive far beyond the sight or reach of men. As he goes under, he dimly hears the man bid him farewell, and thanks once more. ‘Remember me too,' he calls, ‘and perhaps I may return you the favour one day. My name is Pontmercy.’_


	4. Things of the Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _the year 1832 - two stars in a void - Cosette's apprehensions - a letter_

In the year 1832, King William IV entered the second year of his reign. His niece, the thirteen-year-old Princess Victoria, departed on a tour of the country, leaving a London still wasted and weeping in the wake of Spring’s cholera outbreak. While the Parliamentary tussle over voter reform spilled into the streets, medicine secured the year’s true political victory: the licensing of anatomists, and legal dissection of unclaimed bodies. The Geological Society, excited by Mary Anning’s ichthyosaurs, nonetheless rejected her bid for membership; meanwhile, a young Ada Lovelace was preparing for her presentation at court, dreaming of perhaps finding someone with whom to discuss the mathematical possibilities of human flight. The journals praised advancements made by French chemists, who had demonstrated at the Academie des Sciences a new method of preserving hearts, but decried the reading public’s appetite for modern translations of the Spanish novels.

The opera was dreary; the Cosmorama on Regent Street drew hordes of delighted juveniles to gaze on the recent fire of Constantinople; and on the Strand, the Exhibition of Mechanical Inventions displayed a wonderful improvement in the art of killing, by name of the steam-gun. One summer’s night, the respected actor Mr. Charles Gill was taken for a thief and arrested for loitering by the theatre door while in possession of a wig. It was a year of sickness, spectacle, and suspicion, in which a quartern loaf of bread cost eight pence, while a good dress was a full eight pounds.

In the north, London’s coal-blackened bricks marched outwards, teaching hungry fields and forgotten parish grounds to become city, to put up walls and fold in upon themselves. At Euston, farmers petitioned against the building of a new grand station for the London and Birmingham Line; by the old church of St. Pancras, granary barges stopped at the corner of Regent’s Canal to unload their golden cargo of wheat and barley.

Not long prior to this busy epoch, this had been an area of fields and market gardens, rich in clay, where bricks were made and sent off elsewhere, not kept to block off the horizon; it had been airy and green with good taste and lively minds in its population. Wollstonecraft had held literary court here in the final year of her life, writing often to her next-door-neighbour (and husband); young Dickens, aged eleven, had become re-acquainted with London at the same spot. This was Somers Town, once favoured by émigrés for its pleasant spaciousness, its air of unhurried opportunity. Now, it was transformed — no longer countryside, not yet a slum; not so crowded that a man would struggle to eat, breathe or travel, but not so spacious that he could be easily noticed; not so built-over that nothing wild remained, and yet not so open as to be exposed. And finally, it was not so French as to be closed off from the city around it, but home to enough French blood that an exile could find his way there.

To put it briefly, it was ideal for the pair who had recently taken a small apartment above a stationer’s shop. An old man with stark white hair, a young woman of striking beauty, both with an aura of sorrow that seemed deeper and heavier than the grief of exile — yet each with a light that shone brighter for the other’s presence. Like two stars plucked from the full sky and hurled into a void, they had only each other to shine upon. But while two stars might content themselves with such an arrangement, two hearts are likely to have more trouble — particularly if one is well-worn, and the other is hot and young; if one is inured to the changes of the world, and the other is just getting a taste for it.

This is not to say that they kept an unhappy home together: it was clean and well-furnished, and what it lacked in sunlight was more than made up for in fond words and warm silences.

The man had the smaller room, furnished it modestly; for his daughter, meanwhile, he did all he could to provide comfort, colour, and pleasant diversions. It was nothing to her spacious rooms in Paris — no silks, no grand mirrors and nothing on which to play music to herself — but he had gone out one morning shortly after their arrival and returned with arms full of paper-wrapped parcels, which she tore open to reveal all the French books he was able to find, and some in English. She had a desk, a writing-set, fresh bunches of flowers to range around the space. She had a window facing the street, through which she could just see the trees of the park where they often walked. And beyond that, rooftops upon rooftops, vanishing into the city fog.

This was her world, now: a small world, perfectly measured to surround the two of them. Beyond this little world of theirs was another, and its name was London; she knew nothing about it, nothing of its people, its moods, the scandals and discoveries that swayed it in that turbulent year.

Her father had begun to teach her English, which he spoke well (as ever, there was no explanation of how, or why), but their lessons never moved far beyond how to exchange pleasantries or name the trees and flowers in the park. The English books she had had been chosen carefully — dusty chapbooks of children’s prayers, and collections of easy rhyming verse. But there was one, the most recently printed, that drew her eye, a slim volume in green and gold, named simply: _Poems, Chiefly Lyrical_. She had spent nights bent over it by candlelight, sounding out words, her candle trembling as if it were a mirror to her voice — for here were words that stirred up strange thoughts within her:

_Below the thunders of the upper deep,_  
 _Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,_  
 _His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep_  
 _The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee  
_ _About his shadowy sides —_

Not all the words were comprehensible, not yet, but merely the shape and sound of them was enough to call up dark and looming visions. It was in these moments, after night had descended, when it was only herself and her candle and the words, that she allowed the queer tides that were forever ebbing and flowing at the base of her mind to rise up, bringing all their dread and wonder with them. She remembered the crossing only in a handful of images: boarding the ship, the land disappearing into rain-blue nothingness behind them, a storm that had felt like a dream, the sky replaced by a great booming drum that called her out of sea-swayed sleep. And then waking to light too bright, noise too loud, in a place that slowly resolved itself into a room filled with foreign voices, herself wrapped in blankets, everything harsh and grating — until strong warm arms found her, and a voice she knew sobbed into her shoulder _oh god, Cosette_ , and her first coherent thought was how strange it was to hear her father cry.

Since then, they had put the sea miles and months behind them, and yet sometimes in the night she felt it pulling, pulling at her, inside and out. It was as though the waters had poured into her skull and now refused to leave, filling her dreams with their murmurs and other, stranger sounds. Sometimes it sounded almost like laughter and song, but in nothing resembling a human voice.

She read words that felt like obscure incantations on her lips —

_Unnumbr’d and enormous polypi  
_ _Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green_

— and felt a nameless fear wind its way around her heart.

‘Come, Cosette,’ she whispered sternly. ‘You know how wild and roaming your thoughts go in the night. These apprehensions are nothing but the shadow-hat all over again.’ She tried a light laugh, remembering how the shadow of a chimney in her old garden had so preyed on her mind.

The laugh rang thin and flat; the twisty light and shade thrown by the candle recalled the way that the vastness of the night had turned her beloved garden fantastic, shadows free to roam and mingle and hint at bigger, older things than she could know or remember. This night-time feeling, this whispering in her heart, was nothing new; she had felt it then, she had felt it always. But it had been quelled by —

‘Marius,’ she whispered. With all his sweetness and fluster, his bright heart and soft eyes and a face that was always flushed with some mixture of passion and embarrassment. Never a shred of strangeness or uncertainty, when he was near; to speak with him was to banish all of that away. Perhaps to write to him, now, would disperse tonight’s dark reflections.

 _My dear Marius,_ she wrote;

_What a marvellous thing is love! How durable, how elastic. You may stretch it right across the sea and feel no great strain on it. Here I am in London, and you in Paris, and I feel this bond between our hearts as strongly as when we sat side by side on our garden bench. Surely the great minds of our century could discover a great deal from studying its properties!_

_What shall I tell you? My little world has not changed since last I wrote — but I have been coming along with my English, with the help of M. Tennyson! Only, I am in some doubt as to the usefulness of his vocabulary. London remains something of a mystery to me, I’ll grant, but I do not suppose it to be populated with bold knights and sea-monsters, all the same. I mean to make an investigation, but I will not tell you too much until I have succeeded — and then I am sure I will have plenty to describe to you!_

_Father has become friends with an old priest from the South, who came here long before we did. He calls on us, sometimes, and I am glad — that Father has someone to talk to, of home and of God — I am glad and yet how I wish I had someone to talk to as well, of home and of the stars and literature and science and politics and fashion, in short, dear Marius, I wish I had you, to speak out loud to. But what should I complain about? I am writing you a letter, and soon it will be in your hands._

_And you will write back — that is a command, this time, Marius; I don’t care if you don’t know what to say. Write me an itemised list of the shapes of the clouds if you must, I will read it with joy. Or perhaps your grandfather makes it difficult; well, you should know that I will have slip down to the street and catch the old woman who wakes up the houses before she raps on our windows. She gets only a few pennies a week for the trouble, but I mentioned to Father once that her clothes looked old and worn, and he went and bought her a new coat, and left enough money for a good supper in the pocket of it. Perhaps she knows it was my doing, or perhaps she is taken with the idea of a romantic conspiracy — in any case, she takes my letters for me. And if I can manage that, in a strange place where I only half-know the language, you can surely manage your grandfather!_

_But I shouldn’t berate you; I’m sure you will write soon. Tell me of Paris! We get no news here — or, I get no news, at any rate. Tell me what the ladies are wearing, and what is being discussed in the lecture-halls. What of your friends? Perhaps you are busy having adventures, but do try to find time to tell me of them._

She wrote gaily, and only paused to wipe at her cheeks so that the noiseless tears that rolled down them would not fall on the paper. She knew not whether Marius lived; still, she wrote.


End file.
